In the third night of heart-attack dreams
(hearts cracking in the shell of the body)I get out of my bed and watch the pale
cracked egg of the moon. I picture youat your desk in the prison, holding this
poem in one hand, reading. You reach outthe other, spread wide like a fan, and touch
these words on the page. (I see my heartin your hand like an egg, pulsing, blue
and untouched.) A poem is thin,translucent as skin at the wrist, a blue
arterial map of the coursing of bloodfrom the heart to the reaching limbs
of the body, channels of veins pulsing backto the hollow muscle of heart. I think
about touch and the pretenseof touching. I think of the graying
and thinning of hair, how it touches the twolobes of the ear. I think of your voice
on the wire through the air, the feel of itrough through my hair to the ear,
how it enters my body and follows the flowof veins to my heart, through flexible vessels
of blood, to my double-lobed, four-chamberedheart. I climb from my membrane of sheets
in the night, to sit at a desk in the cellof my house, to tell you (the blue translucence
of eggs) your heart beats obliquein its restless cage, small as your hand,
or mine, and it grows, heavier, widerdeeper with time (you hold in your broad,
tangible hand, this delicate skin, readingthese thin blue lines down the page) ticking
with mortal fragility.